Here I am, at least for a moment, after all.

The Ur-VKB – the first Vogue Knitting Book of all – sold on eBay yesterday for £21.99, about a fifth of what might have been expected. Why does that never happen when I’m bidding?

Thank you for the help with Posh yarns. I will certainly look with interest when she offers those sweater-sized packages later in the month. But I also dived into stash yesterday, and am very close to your opinion, Dawn. Here is a pile of Shetland jumper weight which I think might stripe rather well, either graduated or just random, fairly broad stripes.

As always, when I seriously engage with the stash cupboard, I came away depressed. I have now been the soul of virtue for a year and a quarter. I have bought yarn three times in that period – for James’s jabot, for Matt’s socks, and for James’s Christmas scarf. All three items were promptly knit. All other knitting in the last 15 months has been from stash. Several bagsful have gone to the charity knitters in Alyth.

There has been no effect at all on the amount of yarn in the cupboard.

So maybe I’ll stick with Shetland stripes for the Japanese shirt.

I finished the left-hand side of RtB. Here is a picture of my grafting, of which I am very proud. That line where the green shoulder joins the stop-of-sleeve stripe is me grafting garter stitch.


I got the second sleeve started, going with Beverly’s judgment and sticking with stripes. I was very nervous as to whether the second skein of “Roadside Gerry” would stripe like the first one, but I am just far enough on to say with some confidence that it will.

I am also nervous about my ability to make the right-hand half a mirror image of what I have just done. The printed instructions – in Meg’s book “Handknitting” – have very little to say on the subject. The DVD is completely silent – it goes straight from the grafting I did yesterday to the i-cord binding at the end, of which there will be yards and yards and of which, I am sure, there is much to be said.

I’ll figure it out in the end. I must simply be prepared to frog. And for now, I have a nice peaceful sleeve to knit.

And now I’m on my way to be beautified.